My only issue when I first installed Bea is that my Audigy card worked on the live cd and then wasn't even listed after a hd install. I was finally able to get around that issue and had sound working. Mint wants to list my souncard that's disabled in the bios and set it as the default. Apparently, a recent update has now broken sound. I checked my device and my audigy was unselected and the onboard soundcard was defaulted> I put it back to audigy and rebooted but still no sound.

Just an update that my Audigy Platinum 2 card is working. I wish I could tell you how but I honestly don't know.

I checked everywhere to ensure that the audigy was picked as the audio default. It was but when I ran alsamixer it kept showing Realtek. I went to synaptic and chose alsa tools, alsamixer gui and a couple other alsa packages. Once installed, I brought up the alsamizer gui and audigy 2 was there! I went to play a song and BOOM! there was sound!

I have no idea what happened but now my Audigy card is alive again. I've seen that Ubuntu in general has issues with Audigy cards so not sure that it's necessarily a Mint thing.